Unfilling my inbox: NetBSD news from the past few weeks - ACPI, NUMA, Xen, and more
Herre are some more things that I've caught in my inbox for too long,
and I'm finally finding some time
to sum them up here:

NetBSD's "let's move kernel parts to the userland" RUMP
project is still under heavy development, and in order
to make testing of compatibility after kernel changes easier,
a new command "rumptest" was added to build.sh:
``Basically you say:

./build.sh ${yourargs} tools ; ./build.sh ${yourargs} rumptest

Where yourargs are what have you, e.g. '-U -u -o -O /objs'.

The latter builds only the rump kernel libs and uses some ld+awk magic
to figure out if things go right or not. This is to avoid having to
install headers and build libs (which is too slow since a full build is
too slow). The magic is not a substitute for a full build, but it is
n+1 times faster and works probably 99.9% of the time.

The scheme uses a number of predefined component sets
(e.g. tmpfs+vfs+rumpkern) to test linkage. They are currently listed
in build.sh. This area probably needs some work in the future. It would
be nice to autogenerate the combinations somehow.

According to
Wikipedia,
``Non-Uniform Memory Access or Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessors, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory, that is, memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors.''

Staying with ACPI and Christoph Egger, he found that even
though the ACPI spec defines an ACPI device for fans,
BIOS vendors and OEMs do their own thing.
To accommodate things like the fan sensor found in
the ACPI Thermal Zone in his HP Pavillion DV9700 laptop
he has
proposed a driver
to extend the acpitz(4) driver with fan information.
That way, envstat(8) can be used to display the ran's
RPMs:

The documentation covers how to enable the
Direct Rendering Manager (DRI), setting up and configuring
Modular X.org, assuring that everything's in place, and
how to get
Compitz going. Mmm, wobbly windows at last! :-)

While we're talking funky desktop stuff: Marc Balmer has
submitted
a patch to get touchpanel support for ums(4).
ums(4) is for USB mice, and in contrast to mice, touch panels need
to deal with absolute numbers, not relative numbers.

Back to the guts of the kernel, another patch suggested
by Christop Egger was for
adding x2apic. What is x2apic?
X2APIC is
``an Intel-only feature but can also be found
in virtual environments with support for CPU apic id's > 0xff.

Last one for today: Michal Gladecki,
Editor-in-Chief of BSD Magazine
writes:
``We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form. It will look like the BSD magazine one is familiar and comfortable with. Please sign up to our newsletter at www.bsdmag.org and get every issue straight to your inbox. Also, you can now download any of the previous issues from our website. The first online issue -- 2/2010 -- is coming out in February. Please spread the word about BSD Magazine. ''
Click!

So much for today. I still have a bunch of news items
in my inbox for next time, but let's call it
good for today.

Unrelated, I've been playing with git a bit over the
past few days, and wile I have a number of questions building up
(which will be subject to tech-repository or so), what I
can say today is that the speed of "git pull" with
NetBSD's git repository and my 1MBit DSL line reminds me
a lot of the times when I used SUP with my 56k modem
- it took forever, too. :-(

More on DRM, DRI, and whatever else is needed for hardware-accelerated 3D gfx
Further work has been done on DRI and DRM support,
to the extent of
getting 2100FPS in glxgear
and running
compiz
``with all of the fancy wobbly / expose / fade / etc. plugins active''.
Jared McNeill did a lot of the work in that area, and he
also provided the start of a mesa-dri package
that can be found in pkgsrc-wip/mesa-dri now, and which is the
OpenGL library that uses the DRI/DRM interface.
A lot of this is work in progress, and there's also
a status report with some hints on how to get
various cards going,
together with some more hints on how to get things going
here
and
here.

There's no consistent documentation available on this yet,
but maybe someone wants to start something, e.g. on
wiki.onetbsd.org?

Originating on FreeBSD and adopted for NetBSD's autoconf and bus_dma
framework by Yorick, the code's already
committed to NetBSD-current
and waiting for testers (and documentation writers... anyone? :).
See
Yorick's original mail
for some instructions on how to get started.

Direct Render Interface support
It seems "Tonnerre" has done work to support the Direct Render Interface,
which is needed to do hardware-accellerated 3D graphics, on NetBSD.
See
the project's page
and
the discussion that started on tech-kern.
The available code seems to be for X.org only, and needs some more
work to be usable on non-PC platforms (sparc64, macppc), but it's
definitely a good first step.

3D Hardware Accelleration: DRI for ATI Radeon
Jonathan Perkin got the X Direct Render Interface going on NetBSD
with his ATI Radeon Mobility 9000. It's a bunch of patches
right now, but I guess it won't take long until this is in mainline
NetBSD xsrc. The question whether this will be in NetBSD 2.1 (the
next patch release) or 3.0 (the next major release) is unclear yet.
Now if my ATI Rage Pro would be supported, or anyone 'd drop me
a ATI Radeon card...? :)